Have you ever wondered why big businesses are so good at making money? Is it because big businesses hire a greasy car salesman to scream at you until you buy? ….nope, that’s not it. The reason big businesses are so good at making money is, ultimately, because they implement and develop incredible marketing and sales processes.
Here’s how you can build a marketing and sales process for your small business.
Map out your customer engagement funnel
The first step in creating an incredible marketing and sales processes is to map out, what I like to call, your customer engagement funnel. This will give you a conceptual framework to measure and keep track of your progress. Ideally, you’ll want to keep track of how efficiently leads pass through each phase and then continually optimize each phase of your system.
Understand your target market
The best way to efficiently pass leads through your marketing and sales funnel is to have a clear understanding of what your target market deems to be “valuable”.
This tends to be a tricky one for small businesses. In business school they teach you that you need to first do the research and then create a product or service to meet those demands. While that would certainly be ideal, it just doesn’t seem to be the case for most small businesses already operating; they’ve already launched a product or service based on their hunch that it would be a valuable product.
If that’s you, I wouldn’t sweat it. Understanding your target market is an on-going and evolving process that should continually give you more and more insight into what your target market values. Ultimately, this will let you define what type of person is most likely to buy your product or service and what additional products or services you could possibly provide to them in the future.
Map out your customer’s experience path
Often times, we’re good at determining “explicit” characteristics of our target market such as how big their business is or what industry they operate in. However, it’s just as important that we try to determine “implicit” characteristics as well.
A great way to start identifying implicit characteristics of your target market is to make assumptions of how your ideal customer got to where they are today. This path shows you what is relevant to potential future leads and gives you insight into how you can help them along the experience path during the “nurturing” phase of your marketing funnel.
Consider the experience path above. Assuming that this experience path is accurate, a first time entrepreneur who is bootstrapping a new business isn’t likely to be very interested in hearing about Beckon Online because they lack experiences that make Beckon Online valuable.
Even if a lead has all of the “explicit” qualifications of a sales-ready lead, they may still not be ready to buy. You’ll need to accurately identify both explicit and implicit qualification scores to have an effective marketing and sales process.
Mapping out your marketing process
Once you have a good understanding of how the marketing and sales processes work together, you’ll need to actually start developing the details of each; your marketing process and your sales process.
You’ll want to use a tool like Gliffy to create a marketing process that looks something like this:
Your specific layout could look different, however, the general principle is still the same:
- Somehow generate traffic to your website
- Convince visitors to exchange basic information with you
- Engage, interact, and help that person along until they are “sales-ready”
- Once sales-ready, send the lead to your sales process
Nurturing and qualifying leads
If someone is going to grant you permission to market to them, you’re going to need to give them something they really want. And once you get your foot in the door, you need to pay close attention in order to learn what their “problem” is so you can better understand what “value” looks like. You’re NOT trying to sell at this point. Rather you’re simply trying to understand how you can be helpful.
As you help your lead develop and become more sales-ready, you’ll need a way to know when it’s okay to pitch them your product. This is called lead-scoring and is done by awarding points to your lead every time they make progress towards becoming sales-ready. Once they reach a certain sales-ready score, it is then appropriate to move them into your sales process.
Mapping out your sales process
Once you have a clear picture of how your marketing process will funnel in and develop potential customers, you need to have a clear understanding of how you will actually close those opportunities. Below is an example of a general sales process. Start with something like this and evolve your process to make it more effective.
Your marketing process should hand off qualified ‘sales-ready’ leads to your sales process. At each phase, you should be able to measure how well leads passed through the marketing and sales funnel. The goal here is to pass leads through your marketing and sales funnel in the most cost-effective way possible. If you find that one phase has a particularly low conversion rate, you need to figure out what is going on and fix it. Once your marketing and sales process starts to capture paying clients, you’ll then want to maintain those clients and sell them additional items that add value.
Marketing and sales should improve value and ROI
At the end of the day, people are only going to buy what you are selling if it is valuable to them. It’s very important to realize that different people find value in different things. “Value” to you may not be “value” to the next person.
When you first implement your marketing and sales processes you may find that it’s not very efficient at generating and capturing leads. Most likely it’s because your assumptions about what your target market values are incorrect.
That’s okay though – as you move forward you will narrow in on what is valuable and what is not. When you do, it will drive down the cost of your marketing and sales process; ultimately driving up the return on your investment.